Been a while since last entry -- thrown a few junk drafts
away.
Been an awfully frustrating stretch of time. Quick rundown:

I spent a lot of time trying to sort out a business
concept for
a service cooperative to support independent agents in
installing
and maintaining home networking and automation systems. This
still seems to be the right idea, although I haven't gotten
anyone
else interested, and I haven't gotten a good handle on
exactly
what the technical side involves. (I tried tracking Neil
Cherry's
LinuxHA project, but without my own HA system I haven't been
able to follow what's going on.) So, finally, I'm throwing
my hands
up in the air on that idea. I'd like to at least clean up my
business
plan notes and post them, but it's been hard to concentrate
on
something that feels like a failure.

Meanwhile, started looking for a job, which has always
been
difficult for me. My standards (work at home in KS, work on
open
source software) don't make it easier. I'm also kind of a
senior
guy expert at nothing in particular, with extensive dabbling
but
no convincing mastery in a number of fields -- most
recently,
kernel work, but the last kernel related interview I had was
a
severe embarrassment. I suppose I could go back to
consulting
on publishing systems, but as long as I insist on open
source
work, I feel like I have to start all over again. (I'm old
enough
to feel uneasy about that.)

I did get a bit of work done on my Ftwalk language. In
fact,
got past a problem that had been strumping me for months,
which was how to build an RPM package. The problem wasn't
how to build a RPM .spec file; rather, it was a conflict
between
my expectations of what a packaging system should do, and
what RPM actually wants to do. My expectation is one should
be able to simply do ...

tar zxvf ftwalk-1.5.3.tar.gz

cd ftwalk-1.5.3.tar.gz

./configure

make

su root -c 'make rpminstall'

... and get Ftwalk installed under package manager control.
Alas,
what RPM wants to do is:

rpm -ba ftwalk-1.5.3.spec

rpm -i ftwalk-1.5.3.i386.rpm

This is not the place to go into the ins and outs of this,
but suffice
it to say that these are solutions to two different
problems, that
RPM makes it difficult to solve the first, and that the
second is
not anywhere near as simple as it looks (and certainly not
worth
the trouble for anyone who is actually working in the build
area,
as opposed to merely building in it).

Took a quick look at pliant's Pliant
project.
In some senses this is much like Ftwalk; e.g., that we both
spent
a long time working privately before disclosing this work to
the
world, and that the world has meanwhile adopted unaesthetic
but mostly practical alternatives.
But I would never characterize Ftwalk as "my life's work" --
however hard up I am for other accomplishments -- it is
merely
a small idea that got a little out of hand, which I handicap
by
ignoring it for long stretches, but find interesting and
amusing
enough that I don't seem to ever be willing to trash it.
Pliant, on
the other hand, is a big idea, which in part at least seems
to be
well reasoned. In particular, it does seem to be the case
that
there is a desire on the part of users for systems that are
much
simpler and cleaner than what we offer them, and that
simplicity
and cleanness and so forth are not especially well supported
by
the current tool set. But turning a sensible critique into a
solution
is never easy, and simple solutions tend to be unacceptably
limiting.

I've been reading Peter Wayner's book, Free for All:
How
Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech
Titans. It's a useful book, with some information that I
had
not known that is good to have. However, it's got problems,
too.
For instance, page 9 asserts two intrepretations that are
counter
to my bent:

That companies keep code private to keep secrets from
their
competitors. In my experience, this is done to keep the
customers
in the dark.

That Linus Torvalds made Linux free to allow it to be
distributed more broadly. I'd hazard a guess that Linus did
this
to get other people to help write Linux -- correctly
perceiving
that a reliable kernel is not something that one sane person
can do all by himself.

These are points that can be argued. More annoying is a
tendency
to over-dramatize and to raise innuendo (e.g., the
discussion of
whether Stallman is a communist). I'm also perplexed by what
I
guess is a literary motif: 22 chapters, all with single word
titles,
which form little ruminations on keywords like Love, Money,
and
Sex (although the latter was actually called "Fork"). Not
done yet,
but thus far I don't see anything that lives up to the
subtitle.
There is a book to be written about AT&T's Unix floundered
under
arrogance, greed and blunder, and ultimately fell prey to
Linux.
(True, the details of the epilogue are not in yet, but the
plot line
is secure.) This isn't that book. Nor is it the unfinished
saga of
how Microsoft meets its match. Anecdotes and
generalizations,
not much more.

I wrote down some notes on the US elections and pushed
them
up to my web site. Sometimes I think I'd like to chuck
programming
and try my hand as a pundit, but there doesn't seem to be
nearly
as much opportunity on the left as on the right (don't know
that
there's any support whatsoever for wherever the hell I
stand).

Also put up a preliminary year-end music list. I'm
planning
on writing some annotation for this list at least.
Meanwhile, there
is some really superb saxophone out there (Rollins, Carter),
and
Jimmie Dale Gilmore has never sung better.

I'm very sad now to hear that my Aunt Edith Hixson has
died.
She was the last of my mother's family of eight; effectively
the
last person alive who knew my mother as a child. The end of
a
generation. She was born in Arkansas in 1911, followed the
Okies
to CA. She had a very tough life, which she suffered with
quiet,
modest dignity. I barely knew her while I was growing up,
and
had few chances to see her later, but they were intensely
etched
in my mind. I saw her last in July, shortly after my mother
died.
She may have seen in mom's death the inevitability of her
own;
in her death I see the finality of my mother's.